LKS: ARTICLES AND FUGUES

The Rebranding Of Sylvia Plath

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:58:00 -0400

(not an article) New Hampshire Public Radio, May 13, 2013- my discussion of the ongoing reconsideration of Sylvia Plath, on the 50th anniversary of her death, on “Word of Mouth,” with moderator Virginia Prescott.

The "Klinghoffer pillow" (5/15/13) | What My Mother Gave Me

Wed, 15 May 2013 17:51:00 -0400

The "Klinghoffer pillow" (5/15/13) | What My Mother Gave Me:

When I was in college, in the 1980s, my roommates and friends would occasionally get care packages from home—chocolate-chip cookies, an Easter box, a scarf, earrings, a new coat, or whatever it may have been. But my mother, who is deeply loving and irrepressibly creative, has an ironic sensibility (which she transferred to me in my tenderest youth) and is also a workaholic, so I never expected to receive a box of maternal Rice Krispie treats from her; and I never did.

Back then, she and my father were overwhelmed with responsibilities at home in Oklahoma: team-teaching a course at Oklahoma State University on the United States and the Soviet Union, chauffeuring my younger brothers to their high school classes and practices, and struggling to make my tuition. Our long, roving, hilarious weekly phone calls were all I needed as proof of love.

But in my sophomore year, unheralded, a package slip arrived for me at Yale Station. Going to the pick-up window, I found a brown cardboard box. In it was a throw pillow, on which my mother (who sews, knits, cooks, and plays piano and violin) had embroidered a quote that had convulsed her from that autumn’s evening news. In lavish colors, and in a highly ornamental script, it read, in full: “IF IT CAN HAPPEN TO LEON KLINGHOFFER IT CAN HAPPEN TO ANYONE. —MEMENTO MORI - TOM BROKAW, NBC NEWS - OCT. 9, 1985.”

Many of you may not remember this tragic incident from the warmup days of the current, prolonged “War on Terror,” but on October 7,1985, Palestinian hijackers took over a cruise ship called the Achille Lauro that was sailing outside of Alexandria. The next day, one of the hostages, a wealthy wheelchair-bound man named Leon Klinghoffer, was shot by the hijackers, then pushed overboard. (One news report claimed he bit the thumb of one of his captors, but I am not sure that was true. Other reports said he was singled out because he was Jewish.) Reporting this event on the 9th, Tom Brokaw had delivered the line in such a grave, rueful tone that my mother felt it needed commemoration: in red blue and green embroidery thread.

This relic is precious to me. It has traveled with me from dorm rooms to three different New York apartments, and is now faded, stained with paint marks, and slightly flattened from the attention of various cats. My friends who have never met my mother look at that pillow and feel they know her to the core.

My mother and father moved out East in the 1990s with my brothers in tow, and now are retired, living in the Shenandoah Valley. Though she’s been retired for almost a decade, Mama still routinely does all-nighters, feverishly painting basset hounds and small animals for Virginia art fairs, and writing a humor column for a regional paper. She remains tirelessly inventive, hounded by the desire to create. My father has been co-opted as her manager, which is kind of a full-time job.

Last year, Mama and Papa visited me in New York, bringing my six-year-old nephew with them, to indoctrinate him in love of NYC. Seeing how besmirched and pale the Klinghoffer pillow had become, Mama, I later realized, hatched a plan.Five years ago, she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and she can no longer do embroidery—even though she painstakingly paints, hour after hour, in the sunny studio she and my father built for her (it’s hexagonal, in loose imitation of the octagonal studio of the Russian painter Ilya Repin). Threading a needle is just too hard for her these days, given the motor skills inhibition caused by her disease.

But this spring, in Virginia, at Easter, Mama surprised me with another unexpected care package. In it I found a newly embroidered version of the Klinghoffer pillow. On Etsy, she had found a craftswoman who could do what my mother no longer could, and give her gift a longer life. The woman could not transmit the whimsy of Mama’s lettering, but the words were brilliantly there, clean, bright and fully legible.

Today, both pillows are on display on my battered sofa in my sunny living room. They still make visitors marvel, and they still make me laugh, and shake my head at my mother’s dauntless energy and capricious spirit.

New Book Reveals Postwar Germany's Nazi Party Ties Cover-Up

Fri, 10 May 2013 10:22:23 -0400

New Book Reveals Postwar Germany's Nazi Party Ties Cover-Up :

An interview feature with the German journalist Malte Herwig, about his new book, “Die Flakhelfer,” which shows how, for decades, postwar German leaders suppressed records of prominent citizens’ Nazi pasts, with the acquiescence of the U.S. government.

Seeing Sylvia Plath With New Eyes - Cultural Studies

Sun, 05 May 2013 12:00:16 -0400

Seeing Sylvia Plath With New Eyes - Cultural Studies:

Reported essay: poets discuss the importance of broadening Sylvia Plath’s legacy, on the 50th anniversary of her suicide. They seek to emphasize her craft and work, not her biography. Includes a discussion of Elizabeth Winder’s new book on Plath’s 1953 summer in New York, “Pain, Parties, Work.”

ESSAY ON AMANDA KNOX, UPON HER 2009 CONVICTION (OVERTURNED IN 2011), FOR MURDER, IN ITALY, IN 2007

Sun, 05 May 2013 11:54:00 -0400

LET HER EAT BISCOTTI: REFLECTIONS ON THE MURDER TRIAL OF THE AMERICAN STUDENT AMANDA KNOX IN ITALY

By Liesl Schillinger

The foreign interloper was loathed by native patriots, who proudly, angrily festooned themselves with the colors of their nation’s flag as they condemned her. The popular press branded her as a frivolous, self-involved spendthrift, a sexual deviant and a cruel wildcat, circulating caricatures of her as a predatory leopard. Of what crime was she guilty? Evidence associating her with direct wrongdoing remains inconclusive, but there’s no question she was guilty of exciting intense hatred in the imagination of her adopted countrymen, and of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The woman described above is not Amanda Knox—the 22-year old middle-class American student from Seattle, known to the Italian public as “foxy Knoxy,” “the praying mantis,” and “a female Lucifer with an angel’s face,” who last Friday was convicted by a court in Perugia, Italy, of the November 2007 murder of her roommate, the British student Meredith Kercher.

No, the woman in question is Marie Antoinette, the Habsburg archduchess and scion of the powerful Austro-Hungarian empire who traveled to France when she was a teenager to marry the future King Louis XVI, became Queen of France in 1774, and was beheaded during the Terreur in 1793—by which time she had become a catch-all receptacle for every abomination and resentment that French republicans could sling at her–a slop-bucket for scraps of class hatred and xenophobia.

Listening to the round-the-clock news coverage last week of the verdict that condemned Amanda Knox to 26 years in prison, based on “virtually no evidence that would stand up in an American court,” according to the Vanity Fair correspondent Judy Bachrach, I remembered a book about Marie Antoinette I’d read and reviewed several years ago, by Caroline Weber: “Queen of Fashion.” That book vigorously and effectively tracked the wave of envy, suspicion, hatred, and contempt for the immigrant queen that built among citizens in revolutionary France until it engulfed her, carried her bodily to the tumbrel, and dropped her onto the Place de la Concorde to her doom. It struck me that public attitudes to both women bore much in common.

Amanda Knox, of course, is not a dead monarch with an exalted pedigree; by all accounts she’s an entirely ordinary, rather “spacey” young woman who has been caught up in extraordinarily appalling circumstances overseas; and whose exact connection to those appalling circumstances remains in dispute. But strong similarities emerge in the way the two women were received by the nations in which they met their comeuppances. Here are some of them. Just as the enemies of Marie Antoinette wore tricolor ribbons as an invidious display of patriotism, half the members of the jury in Perugia who sentenced Ms. Knox to 26 years in prison wore red, green and white sashes—the colors of Italy’s flag. In other words, the rancor displayed toward both women held a nationalistic element.

Just as the French public denounced the Austrian arriviste for excessive attention to her own adornment, the Italian press denounced the American suspect for shopping for lingerie with her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, days after her roommate’s death. That is to say, the rancor had a moralistic element. And just as the French pamphleteers endlessly spread rumors of la Autrichienne’s supposed sexual lubricity (lesbianism, promiscuity and sex toys) the Italian press endlessly discussed la Americana’s vibrator, her loose ways, her Myspace page. So the rancor had a prurient, voyeuristic component, too.

There are, to be sure, any number of differences between the two scapegoats.

For one, the Perugia prosecution team did not distribute drawings of Amanda Knox as jungle cat, as French cartoonists did with Marie Antoinette. They went one better: they created for the jury (both sashed and unsashed members) a Lara-Croft-style animated video that depicted a depraved sex-and-torture-à-trois scenario—a notional re-enactment of the crime—which cast Knox, Sollecito and a Côte d’Ivoirian man named Rudy Guédé as the bloodthirsty villains, with Knox in the assassin’s role, slitting the victim’s throat. This grisly artistic concoction helped produce the guilty verdict.

For another, Marie Antoinette never said, “Let them eat cake”—an attributed remark whose callousness inflamed the French populace against her; whereas Amanda Knox really did do cartwheels at a deposition in Italian court* —an action that outraged the Italian populace. But do cartwheels constitute proof of murder?

Last June, Timothy Egan wrote in an opinion piece for the New York Times that, “The case against Knox has so many holes in it, and is so tied to the career of a powerful Italian prosecutor who is under indictment for professional misconduct, that any fair-minded jury would have thrown it out months ago.” But as Marie Antoinette’s history suggests, fair-mindedness plays little part in mob justice.

The experience of both women, separated by education, rank, nationality and two centuries, shows the pernicious, cynical uses to which feminine reputation can be put, when ill luck plunges a woman into controversy in a land not her own, among detractors who are as implacably bent on vengeance as Dickens’ sinister Madame de Farge.

But was Ms. Knox guilty of the crime she was convicted of? If she was, (many journalists who have reported on the trial doubt her guilt) the Italian legal system has not produced direct, compelling evidence. Before the creation of the fantasy snuff film, the prosecution already knew that Rudy Guédé had confessed to being with Meredith Kercher at the time of her death, knew that Rudy Guédé’s DNA and fingerprints had been found on the victim’s body, and knew that Guédé had fled to Germany after the crime, where he was apprehended, sent back to Italy, and later convicted and jailed.

Nevertheless, the Perugia prosecution team continued to suspect Ms. Knox. The prosecution claims that Amanda Knox’s fingerprints are on the murder weapon and Sollecito’s are on a bra clasp; the defense counters that the fingerprints were contaminated through shoddy police work, and insists that Meredith Kercher’s wounds were not consistent with the shape of the blade. A young woman was brutally murdered on November 1, 2007; and it is right to seek justice for such a horrific crime. If Knox and Sollecito actively caused this death, they should be punished. But what is the evidence?

Judging from the accounts now circulating, the only direct, compelling evidence that the prosecution possesses is that, several years ago, an American foreign exchange student nicknamed foxy Knoxy came to the town of Perugia, used hashish, bought underwear, did cartwheels, and sat in her boyfriend’s lap at inappropriate times. This evidence may be enough to keep her in Italian prison for more than two decades, whether or not concrete crime-scene evidence ever emerges. Knox’s family has vowed to appeal the verdict; but the chances of a reversal are as inscrutable and unknowable as the emotions that brought their daughter to judgment in the first place: emotions that show how very dangerous it is and always has been to be a woman of excessive interest, abroad alone.

END

Note: Amanda Knox was imprisoned in Italy for four years, between 2007 and 2011; and in 2009, was convicted of the murder of Meredith Kercher. In October, 2011, that conviction was overturned, and Knox returned to America. On April 30, 2013, she published her memoir, “Waiting to Be Heard,” and the next day, she spoke with Diane Sawyer of ABC News. In the interview, Knox said that, although she was widely reported to have done cartwheels, “I never did a cartwheel, I did do the splits.”)

The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud

Fri, 03 May 2013 16:26:39 -0400

The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud:

My review of Claire Messud’s seething and arresting new novel, about a furious woman in her 40s who risked too little, early; and too much, later on.

WNYC News - Six Months After Sandy: Calm in the Storm

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 08:56:22 -0400

WNYC News - Six Months After Sandy: Calm in the Storm :

My essay on WNYC, marking the six-month anniversary of Hurricane Sandy; recalling the storm and the day after, and my forty-block walk through the silent city from my (unharmed) East Village tenement up to midtown—where I found an unexpected idyll.

The Year of the Cat -Books of Style

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 12:05:23 -0400

The Year of the Cat -Books of Style:

VIPcats…2013 marks a feline apotheosis, in which cats are writing books, dazzling fans at SXSW, starring in TV shows, and appearing on the covers of magazines…as well as in the new, improved Monopoly game.

Madbeth: Alan Cumming's Vertiginous Spin on Shakespeare's "Macbeth"

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 11:46:31 -0400

Madbeth: Alan Cumming's Vertiginous Spin on Shakespeare's "Macbeth":

What will he do next? Liesl Schillinger gets caught up in Alan Cumming’s whirling rendition of Macbeth—and Lady Macbeth, and Duncan, Banquo, Macduff, etc—in a suspenseful new production of the Scottish play.

Turning to Tolstoy 's "Hadji Murad" As Boston Locked Down

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:48:16 -0400

Turning to Tolstoy 's "Hadji Murad" As Boston Locked Down:

During the aftermath of the Boston bombing, finding refuge in Tolstoy’s potent, lyric, enveloping short novel about the Chechen rebel leader”Hadji Murad,” set in the mountains of the Northern Caucasus, more than a century ago.

"The Interestings," by Meg Wolitzer

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 22:30:00 -0400

"The Interestings," by Meg Wolitzer:

My review of “The Interestings,” Meg Wolitzer’s newest—and best—novel. NYTBR April 21, 2013.

On the Trail of the Bebop Baroness (Newsweek/Daily Beast 3/25/13)

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 09:31:00 -0400

On the Trail of the Bebop Baroness (Newsweek/Daily Beast 3/25/13):

My review of a new bio of Pannonica (Nica) Rothschild de Koenigswarter-the rebellious, jazz-obsessed heiress (and former Free French Army warrior during WWII) who left her husband and five children so she could move to New York and devote herself to bebop. She spent three decades in the thrall of Thelonious Monk and the giants of modern jazz.

Miami, My Way (NYT Travel, Mar. 24, 2013)

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 16:02:00 -0400

Miami, My Way (NYT Travel, Mar. 24, 2013):

My love song to Miami, Dade County and Key Largo’s untrendiest—but most enduring— attractions.

GEN-X vs. BOOMERS (Washington Post -Outlook, 12/18/1994)

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:38:55 -0400

Johnnie sat in the crib, clutching a Fisher-Price fun-box and absent-mindedly punching a beep button on its top. He smiled broadly, rolled over a stuffed Curious George doll, dropped the fun-box and turned his attention to the bright dinosaurs circling in a mobile overhead, clamped to a corner of the crib. Johnnie was sucking on a beer, a few beads of which had dropped down onto his Shaggy-from-Scooby-Doo beard. It was Friday night in the East Village, and Johnnie, who is 28 years old, was hanging out at Babyland, Manhattan’s hottest new club.

“There’s a limousine parked out front, and it’s the East Village,” he said crankily. “Can’t those idiots go somewhere else?”

In fact, there aren’t many places a Generation-X-er can go to escape the relentless encroachment of the Baby Boomers, who hotly pursue the amusements of the young with the cash and clout of the old. But in the past few months, more and more places like Babylandhave been opening in New York and across the country where the young can hide out unharassed — ever since someone figured out that the one place the Me Generation has always shunned was the nurseries of its resented, yammering children. It is the captives’ revenge; they were shut in the nursery and forgotten by parents too hip to relish the tedious role of child-raiser; now older if not wiser, they have learned to love their prison. They are refusing to leave it and enter the real world, and their captors are restless. Will their young charges ever leave, so the next shift can take over?

It is helpful to think of the cafes and clubs as Pee-wee’s-Playhouses-made-real. Each one has its own character: Some bounce with Romper Room reds and molded plastic like Cafe Assisi in Madison, Wis., of which 19-year-old Barry says happily, “It reminds me of when I would have milk-and-cookie time when I was in kindergarten. You can play board games and there are drawings of trees and stuff, and it’s really laid back.” Others soothe and satisfy with marshmallow pastels, like Cafe Limbo in New York, or the multi-mobiled Double Rainbow in Albuquerque, while Berkeley’s Wall Berlin Kaffeehaus eschews any ornament, leaving the decor to the clientele. “This is goatee haven,” a counter clerk says proudly.

Still, however the regression cafes differ, there is much that unites them: coffee (always), pastries and munchies (always), cigarettes (sometimes), board games (sometimes) and one trumpeting theme: No Adults Allowed: Trespassers Beware.

This rule can be violated at the Boomer’s peril, as an ex-Marine pipefitter discovered to his chagrin in September when he ventured into Manhattan’s Babyland. As he sat drinking, recovering from his daily toil, actor Johnny Depp arrived at the club with a pack of bikers and one all of the bikers allegedly beat the man up, which gives you an idea of what happens when the babies have a run-in with responsible types.

Babyland teems with Romper Room clutter and steams with body heat, cigarette smoke and sour, beer-enhanced grown-baby smells. On any given evening, hundreds of twentysomethings gather there in their kinderwhore pigtails and baby-doll dresses, nose and belly-button rings, backwards-baseball caps and tattoos. They slurp egg creams or alcohol, eat Dunkin’ Donuts and sit amid a clutter of cribs, stuffed dolls, toy-chest-cum-cocktail tables, and every decayed Fisher-Price toy imaginable. Naked Barbie dioramas spin lewdly above the fray. By a giant purple stuffed bear a man grabs a woman’s breast, and she doesn’t seem to mind.

In the nursery, all offenses are accidental; to be in Babyland is to drop backwards through time and away from daily cares, and revelers there succumb to a mood of pleasant helplessness. “I remember my babyhood absolutely clear,” Paulo, 23, said as he sat with his friends in a white crib decorated with paper daisies. Paulo and his friends were playing with a Fisher-Price talking wheel (The rooster says: “Cock-a-doodle-doo!”). “This crib is even more comfortable than I remember it,” he said.

Paulo’s friend Silvia, 21, explained why they had come to Babyland. “Because we’re bored,” she said. “If we had anything to write or read, we probably would do that instead. But we don’t.” Behind them, a copy of A.A. Milne’s nursery rhymes sat on a table painted with the Gingerbread Man, the nightmare-inspiring hero of the children’s story, in which the Gingerbread Man is adopted by a childless couple, but runs away from home and is immediately chased by a fox. The Gingerbread Man shouts at his pursuer, “Run, run, as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man,” but the fox catches him and eats him anyway. It is a lesson Babyland’s patrons have taken to heart: There are scary things outside the nursery; better not to leave.

The Stones’ “19th Nervous Breakdown” began to play, and Paulo and Silvia returned to their mooing cows and oinking pigs. Cynthia, 29, whose scores of snaky braids are clipped at the end in bright plastic birdy barrettes, stood at the bar near a banner that proclaimed “I-T-S-A-B-O-Y!” She wore high-tops, cut-offs and a dangling nose-ring, and a long chain spilled from her neck, holding her door keys. She looked like L’il Jinx on Ecstasy.

“Being at Babyland is like being home, because I’ve got toys all over my apartment,” she said. “I’m really all about the childhood figures that accentuate women’s power. Like Ozma of Oz, and Alice in Wonderland. Ozma was a very strong person as a child, and so was Alice. People would tell her, ‘Oh don’t go there,’ but she would like, go there anyway. Do you want to see my tattoos?” Cynthia asked.

She pulled down her cutoffs to reveal her left flank. Below the thin strap of her underwear was a tattoo of Ozma of Oz with a red flower at either temple. “I have a true belief that if you hold on to your childhood, it will bless you,” Cynthia said fervently. “A child believes everyone is equal. It isn’t about male and female, black and white.”

She showed her other tattoo, on her back, in which a blonde Alice contemplated herself in a mirror. “If you always see your inner child, other people will see it too,” Cynthia said — but as much as she seeks her inner child, she does not seek a child of her own.

“No one has kids anymore, and I think we’re a lot more careful as a generation. I think we think about the consequences of having a child more than our parents did. There’s a real guilt complex in the knowledge of what it takes to be a parent,” she concluded, and went off to get a beer.

Not far away, Blake, 23, was less attuned to his own motivations. “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” he said. “I was dragged here by friends. I don’t know where I’m going next. I guess I’ll just go home, to bed.” And he left.

Two blocks south at the Cafe Limbo, twentysomethings too timid for Babyland sip peppermint tea and eat carrot cake from glazed pastel pottery dishes. Limbo has Easter-egg-dyed walls and colored overhead lights that look like inflated gumballs. Grunge youth sit at ice-cream-shoppe chairs at formica-topped tables with marbled designs like the ones your grandmothers had in their kitchens, and they play Candyland or Life and Scrabble or guess at their futures on the Ouija board. Unthreatening ’70s music plays softly, and anyone too whipped to play a board game can simply stare at Limbo’s walls, which recently featured a gallery of Gap-ad style photos of babies, facing equally self-conscious photos of babes in their mid-twenties pleading for recognition.

Anyone who craves a remembered favorite toy can run one avenue over to Little Rickie (named after Lucy’s baby), an East Village retro toy shop stocked with things like Etch-a-Sketches, Slinkies, annoying tin clickers and rubbery Stretch dolls.

Proximity to retro or fetish boutiques seems to be a running theme: in Madison, only steps away from Cafe Assisi, The Cat’s Meow sells childhood pop culture ’70s toys, leather, chains and fanzines on serial killers — “and these cool ’70s retro lunch boxes,” Barry rhapsodizes. A nearby vintage clothing store tempts Double Rainbow’s coffee drinkers to try on disguises, sample other eras, before slogging back to their own counter jobs. It’s as if the Irrelevant Generation were unconsciously gathering to send a message; they want to go back, start all over again and reinvent themselves, and apparently they’ll need a lot of coffee to do it.

There is something a little sad about these regression hangouts; they resonate of a nursery that is policing itself in the absence of parents and has gone venomously to seed. The unattended children reassure themselves by behaving quietly, sucking on cigarettes instead of pacifiers, and absorbing themselves in peaceful games and comforting drinks, as if in the hope that if their straying parents ever returned, they would have no cause to find fault.

There is an occasional tantrum, a flipping fish in an otherwise tranquil pond. But at 3 a.m. Saturday, long-absent parents show no signs of coming to claim their charges; after all, why worry? What could the young set be up to that could be more harmful than what their parents had already tried? Drugs? Free love? Political protesting? So what? The clientele of places like Babyland and Limbo are in the odd and unparalleled position of being incapable of shocking their parents.

Except for a 25-year-old named Scott, who said that punk rock had taught him how to succeed fantastically at engineering, they are largely incapable of out-earning their parents as well. The X-ers’ worst offenses are only cheap imitations of the boomers’ graver forays into rebellion, as are their highest passions: civil rights, Malcolm X, JFK, Jim Morrison, Twiggy, a.k.a. Kate Moss. Their parents did it all first, and better; and if their parents were the “Me” generation, their children are the “Them” generation, embarrassed even now to distract the aging boomers from their quest for self-expression and to remind them that the next generation would like entry-level jobs and maybe their own apartments, please. Instead, they eat cake, move plastic gingerbread men through the Gooey Gumdrop swamp and stay in a holding pattern.

Only one revenge remains for X-ers: to remain in the nursery and never ever come out, and not to work or have babies themselves. That way, someday, the boomers will be punished both by the lack of Social Security funds to pay their pensions and by the lack of grandchildren to show off to their friends.

Of course, this logic, like everything else X-ish, is unconscious. The baby boomers stayed teenagers; fine. So the X-ers will stay babies, and mutilate themselves and tattoo their flesh, and hold their breath until they turn blue, and when the baby boomers realize this, they will be really, really sorry, so there. After relegating their children to three decades of psychic foster care, the forty- and fiftysomethings have determined to keep time on their side. At Babyland and Limbo, it’s as if they have not only succeeded; they have stopped the clock.

Liesl Schillinger, a New York writer, is a frequent contributor to Outlook.

Empresses of Fantasy (NYTBR Dec. 14, 2012)

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 10:02:09 -0500

Empresses of Fantasy (NYTBR Dec. 14, 2012):

Review of the excellent bio of Diana Vreeland, “Empress of Fashion,” by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart; plus “The Eye Has to Travel” (photo book on Vreeland by Lisa Immordino Vreeland) plus Grace Coddington’s memoir “Grace.”

Master of Us All: Balenciaga (NYT Styles, Jan. 27, 2013)

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 00:41:00 -0500

Master of Us All: Balenciaga (NYT Styles, Jan. 27, 2013):

Review of Mary Blume’s biography of Cristóbal Balenciaga, which brings this distinguished, close-mouthed couturier to life. Balenciaga worked devotedly to let cloth and cut disguise a multitude of flaws in order to make mature women look beautiful. Blume has been able to add rare personal detail to the record through long conversations with Balenciaga’s chief vendeuse for thirty years, Florette Chelot.

Books of Styles: Counterintuitive New Year's Resolutions (NYT Styles, Jan. 6, 2013)

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 18:48:28 -0500

Books of Styles: Counterintuitive New Year's Resolutions (NYT Styles, Jan. 6, 2013):

Round-up for Books of Style of three counter-intuitive new motivational books to aid in confronting the New Year head on—“The Beauty Experiment,” by Phoebe Baker Hyde, “Wheat Belly Cookbook,” by Dr. William Davis; and “Making Habits, Breaking Habits,” by Jeremy Dean.

Cost of Care ( review of ME BEFORE YOU, by Jojo Moyes-NYTBR Jan. 6, 2013)

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 18:41:06 -0500

Cost of Care ( review of ME BEFORE YOU, by Jojo Moyes-NYTBR Jan. 6, 2013):

Review of “Me Before You,” an emotional typhoon of a novel about a young working class woman who becomes the caretaker of a formerly strong-willed and lucky dynamo of a young man …who has been paralyzed in a road accident. by Jojo Moyes.

Soviet Dreams ("Happy Moscow," by Andrei Platonov) NYTBR Dec. 30, 2012

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 11:44:00 -0500

Soviet Dreams ("Happy Moscow," by Andrei Platonov) NYTBR Dec. 30, 2012:

Review of a fresh retranslation of Andrei Platonov’s cheerily grim Soviet-era allegory “Happy Moscow”— a book that likely will fascinate scholars of the period, while tormenting lay readers.

CHRISTMAS IN MOSCOW-2012 (Roads and Kingdoms Global Christmas Showcase)

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 16:55:00 -0500

CHRISTMAS IN MOSCOW-2012 (Roads and Kingdoms Global Christmas Showcase):

Postcard on the Yuletide spirit (Yule as in ‘yolki’—fir-tree) in post-Communist Moscow, where fur hats and festive holiday tchotchkes made of glass, wood and porcelain rustle at you from snowy cobbled streets and in glinting high-end malls.